"Asus has a trio of Windows 8 tablets on deck for the holidays, but the pricing is so high - $599 to $1299 for a hybrid - that it's going to be nearly impossible to compete in the marketplace. We were leaked Asus' holiday roadmap and the slide below tells the tale." If this is for real, Windows 8 is screwed in the tablet space. Nobody is going to buy a Windows tablet at prices higher than the iPad.

Your example misses the point; at the end of the day most corporate purchases revolve around products to run a Microsoft OS/suite. Do they not?

If microsoft can provide a seamless integration of the surface with the windows ecosystem, then they will have some relatively big initial corporate orders. At $600 a tablet that can do most of what a laptop is used for in corporate environments (e-mail, excel/powerpoint, web stuff) really is a no brainer for a lot of corporate environments.

I am not saying that the demand will be earth shattering perhaps, but enough to give windows 8 tablets enough momentum to keep growing. Microsoft is a persistent company. It took them what? 10 years to get the desktop gui OS right, but look at the market share of Windows on the desktop.

I doubt MS are going to command the tablet
market like they do with the desktop, but brushing them off may be premature.